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Northern Lights lit up the Montana sky Monday, and it could happen again Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Jonathan Logan, a science teacher at Paris Gibson Education Center, ran into some of his students when he was viewing the show in the sky along the Missouri River past Giant Spring State Park on Monday. The meeting turned into a lesson.

"There were cars parked all along the river," he said. "It was pretty cool."

It was the third or fourth best northern lights show he's seen.

"Top five easy," Logan said.

It was if the sky was pulsating, said Logan, comparing it to ripples on a pond.

Another solar storm is expected to arrive around 5 p.m. Wednesday and continue for 24 hours, said Don Emanuel, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls.

That bodes well for aurora watchers in North America, he said.

The Weather Service says northern lights might be visible in Montana from the northern border to points south beginning Wednesday evening. The best views will be across southern Alberta and northern Montana, but the lights also could be seen as far south as Salt Lake City, Emanuel said.

The best chance to see the lights is after 11 p.m. and it will depend on cloud cover and the moon, he said. The Weather Service is predicting 35 percent cloud cover in Great Falls Wednesday night.

"We're not going to have a full moon so that shouldn't be too much of a problem," Emanuel said.

Because of the lights in the Electric City, it's best to get away from the city a bit to see the northern lights, Logan said. He recommends just north of the city.

Northern lights come in waves, he said.

"It's kind of like thunderstorms," Logan said. "If you're in the right spot, they're good."

A coronal mass ejection is a giant cloud of solar plasma drenched with magnetic field lines that are blown away from the sun during strong, long-duration solar flares and filament eruptions, according to SpaceWeatherLive.com.

That's when the sun throws off a large mass of particles. Those particles cause auroral lights, typically seen only near the poles, to become visible at lower latitudes. And they can be brilliant.

"It's called a solar storm," said Keith Jaszka, a meteorologist with the NWS in Great Falls. "So it's a burst of electromagnetic energy from the sun. Then that solar energy interacts with the earth's atmosphere and the result is the northern lights as well as the southern lights in the southern hemisphere."

Typical colors are green and purple, but it's not unusual to see pink and blue hues, he said.